DescriptionThis dissertation presents a study of the reconstruction (and subsequent partial disintegration) of the armed forces of Iraq after 2003 as it relates to the larger problematic of state formation and legitimation in contested spaces. The national army, as opposed to paramilitary and police forces, emerged over time as an institution of singular importance in the struggle for Iraq after 2003. Iraq’s new rulers, who otherwise lacked prestige and deeply rooted political support within their own country, sought to appropriate the memory of the old Iraqi Army in order to claim their place as the rightful inheritors of state power. With this inheritance, they claimed, came the legitimate authority to use military force in defense of the new Iraqi state. I traced the development of Iraq’s new armed forces using interviews, archival sources, mass media reports, and photographs, to show how the symbols of Iraq’s militarist past were used by a new regime to bestow a reimagined Iraqi national identity upon military forces raised under foreign occupation and tutelage. My findings challenge the conventional wisdom that state formation in conflict zones of the developing world proceeds directly from a massive military buildup of government forces. Rather, it is the capacity of rulers to credibly sustain claims that their forces represent the nation and the state, which is most important to establishing a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.